Where Sleeping Dogs Lie

My review was written in November 1991 after watching the movie at a Manhattan screening room.

A clash of two dissimilar personalities is examined with mixed success in the thriller "Where Sleeping Dogs Lie". Restrained approach compared to recent films like "Cape Fear" spells modest box office success.

Dylan McDermott portrays an unsuccessful writer in Hollywood who's frustrated by the commercial need to write blood-and-guts stories. His agent Sharon Stone puts on the pressure and he decides to write a detailed novel about a mass killer.

McDermott has just been evicted from his flat and moves into the creepy old mansion his day job real estate boss (Ron Karaatsos) has ordered him to sell. Gimmick is that he uses the house for inspiration, basing his novel on a notorious murder case that took place there.

Before the film can turn into a haunted house suspenser, Tom Sizemore shows up as a twitchy boarder. McDermott is mean to him, flauntging an air of superiority, but before long the tables are turned.

Director Charles Finch (son of the late actor Peter Finch) and his mother, co-scripter Yolande Turner, get good mileage from the insidious relationship of the Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter classic "The Servant".

Film requires a great deal of audience willingness to go along with several far-fetched plot twists notably in McDermott's character. However, both leads' good acting makes it worth the effort, leadking to its unsettling ending.

McDermott is properly macho and overbearing in the interesting departure from his previou straight-arrow roles ("The Blue Iguana", "Hardware"). Sizemore makes a strong impression as the unctuous worm who turns.

Stone ("Basic Instinct") is perfect in a small role as the bitchy agent. Est of the cat has a mere walk-on in a film that reportedly was heavily trimmed to reach its current release version. Result Is a vignette structure with little continuity between individual scenes.

Hans Zimmer and Mark Mancina's melodramatic score does a great job of setting and maintaining the creepy atmosphere.

This movie should have been great.

The acting is great. The locations are excellent, as is the photography, editing and so forth.

The premise is clever, the opening scenes of the script intriguing, and the actions of the characters logical given the circumstances. A few scenes are riveting, and the sequence of events, at least for the first half of the movie, captures your attention completely.

My feeling is that the film was cut, to the point where we are left with only the basic storyboard. The ending is questionable, probably because there are missing pieces of information.

Hopefully, the whole film was shot, and someone will go back and re-edit the final version someday. Or perhaps I am filling in a script that was not revised enough - who knows? But my gut feeling is that this film could have been quite extraordinary.

There are three reasons to watch, and enjoy, this film... Sizemore, Sizemore and Sizemore.

Dylan McDermott is alright and all, beefcake does nothing for me. A dozen guys could've played this part. A half dozen would've made something of it. Sharon Stone... anyone could have played her part, and she acted as if she was proving just that. She looked good doing it, no surprise. A little slow moving and the plot is very predictable but a nice ending semi-twist.

It is Tom Sizemore's performance that makes this film worth watching. I always liked this guy but he does a good-to-great weirdo in this movie.

7 out of 10... Too generous?? To each his own.

The script telegraphs all of its "surprises", the direction is strictly by-the-numbers and Dylan McDermott is a bland lead. There are only two noteworthy elements in this movie: the dangerous, edgy intensity Tom Sizemore brings to his role, and a couple of steamy moments provided by Sharon Stone, who was then at her best-looking phase; at one point she actually says to McDermott: "Don't fret, you 'll get the check in a week and you can have me now". Now that's what I call a GOOD DEAL. (**)

Sure, it's slow on action, but what atmosphere! I really enjoyed this movie the first time around, when I wasn't really paying attention, so I watched it a couple more times on cable. This was the first movie where I had really seen Tom Sizemore and known who he was, and he was absolutely chilling. I thought the interplay between Sizemore's menacing character and McDermott's kind of confused, innocent character was a lot of fun. Poor Dylan. He had no idea what he was getting into when he let that guy into his house, did he? I think the Sharon Stone sequences looked kind of tacked on - not that she didn't brighten up the screen - and I agree with other comments that the plot could have been tightened up, but overall I find it a haunting, very entertaining movie that should have gotten a lot more attention than it did at the time of its release. It didn't show up on cable until several years later. I liked it so much I picked up a copy on eBay and would highly recommend it to anyone who likes creepy suspense films.